It’s called hypnopompic hallucination.
Unlike with sleep paralysis, you can move and talk while still seeing it and it will last a few seconds up to a minute which can seem like an eternity.
It usually fades as soon as you turn on the light, but for some very few people it does not and persists even after turning on the light.
Here’s an example of someone who often experiences these and has started recording themselves: https://youtu.be/bEMGZNvETMQ
Why YSK: because it’s very scary and unsettling when it happens and since you can move you don’t believe it’s sleep paralysis and can’t explain it. This might explain many of the “monster or spirit at the foot of my bed” sightings that we often hear mentioned in horror podcasts.
Our brains love to play tricks on us lol
You ever wake up with no clue where you are? I wonder how our brain gets so confused just by sleeping
That’s something I hate about travel, especially to places I go frequently, like my parents. The whole time I’m there and a few days afterwards when I wake up there’s this intense confusion where my brain reminds itself where I am why I’m there how long I’ll be there. It could just be dreamy and fun, but for me almost makes me nauseous.
or so confused you forgot how to read a clock and just stared at it trying to figure out what the symbols on it meant.
Y’all have it rough. When this happens to me, it’s pretty much always:
- I have a dream that there’s a spider in my bed
- I startle awake, and see that there is a spider in my bed
- I stare at the spider until it fades out of existence
Same, though I’m more convinced and usually get up to turn the light on, and after a few moments realize it’s just a waking hallucination. Luckily I live in a country with no dangerous spiders and just one venomous snake species :D So that logic helps calm the mind down.
Like some others in the thread, I get this occasionally. For me, without fail, it’s seeing hundreds of spiders crawling over the walls, ceiling, and/or bed - I’ve sometimes violently tried to throw the covers off myself to get them away!
Really unsettling, and it happens so infrequently that I’m never prepared for it at all.
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Holy shit! This has happened to me before! I woke up from a nightmare and the creature was I my room with me.
I had a friend who told me he had a whole conversation with his girlfriend about the bikers in the bedroom while he was going to the bathroom right after waking up.
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I remember when I woke up early in the morning for school, and played with a portable console while waiting for my mother to cook breakfast. A few minutes later, I realised I never had a console in the first place, and it vanished into thin air.
Holy shit How did it feel to be so content and one second later realize you didn’t ever own what you accepted as reality?
More confused than disappointed tbh. I’ve always wondered how I could make that happen again. Don’t worry, some years after that I learned how to emulate games to my phone.
Do you guys ever have that thing where you are almost asleep then feel like you’re falling? That scares me everytime.
Yes! Bloody scary. I wake up with my heart hammering.
These are called hypnic jerks.
I also watched House MD.
The technical term I learned in psych is ‘hypnagogic sensations’
They were just asking a question there’s no need to call them that.
Almost never now, but when I was younger, constantly. I wonder if that’s something that goes away with age?
I can’t remember ever experiencing something like this…? Is it possible to forget about it, like a dream? Barely ever remember dreams. Or maybe some people don’t experience these hallcinations?
I was either experiencing this or something similar to it. I was waking in the night and seeing things in the dark that I was sure was there. Really terrible things. A person standing in the corner of my room, something crawling on the ceiling.
I did some reading on the subject and decided to try a sleep mask for a few days. The whole time I wore it I never experienced the visions again. So after that test I decided to get blackout curtains because it was the light bleeding in from a streetlamp that was contributing to the hallucinations.
I’m relieved to know that covering your eyes prevents you from seeing things.
But seriously though, I’m glad you got it figured out because that sounds horrifying.
Haha yeah I guess when you tldr it that’s what it boils down too. Though when you’re seeing things that don’t exist, if covering your eyes didn’t work… I guess it’s time for a hospital trip.
Also, thanks I’m glad I figure it out too.
Damn, both of those things are like the scariest things I can imagine. I think watching the Blair Witch Project and The Ring as a kid really made some lasting impact…
Yeah it was crazy scarry. I also had a lot of stress in my life at the time and I didn’t realize how much stress and burnout had built up within me. I’m sure that helped contribute to my sleeping situation more so than scarry movies. The sad truth is the boring day to day of real life is more horrific than any horror film.
I used to have sleep paralysis almost daily for a while while working a particularly stressful job. I would see and hear people who weren’t there. Usually it was benign and I knew it was happening, so I just tried to keep myself calm. Only a few times have I had what I think is the hypnopompic hallucination, but until now didn’t now the word for it. I was always aware when it was sleep paralysis since I was literally paralyzed. This other instance I most definitely woke up in the middle of the night. A small amount of light bled through our black out curtains and I was hallucinating a horrid, giant scorpion monster on our ceiling/walls. I knew it couldn’t be real but it still scared the shit out of me. I just tried to keep calm and close my eyes like the sleep paralysis episodes and it went away after a little bit.
This happened to me consistently for about 9 years.
The instances were terrifying if I was stressed out. I’d see people in my room screaming at me, people just floating silently watching me sleep, spiders on the wall and ceiling, snakes falling on me, to name a few. One day I looked at my camera roll and found a picture of the empty corner of my room from 2AM, it freaked me out, but then I remembered I was tring to capture a shot of the spider webs full of snakes I thought I saw. Sometimes I’d be across the room from my bed in a full panic, turning on the light switch. It was wild.
If I was not stressed, it would be innocuous things, like a chair that wasn’t supposed to be in the room, or pipes in my ceiling. One time there were gnomes showing me the tiny, glittery door to their world! Weird shit, but not scary.
Then I started antidepressants and they all stopped. Turns out night terrors, or waking terrors as I called them, can be a sign of depression. Who knew? I just thought my brain was a bitch, but she just needed happy pills.
This sounds horrifying. Glad to hear you’re in a better place now.
Thank you! It was really awful for a long time, but it got to a point, years in, where I understood what was happening and that made it easier. I could be jolted awake, seeing something coming at me, panicking as I scrambled to turn on the light, and then watch it slowly fade away. Then I would laugh at myself and tell my brain to fuck off and fall back asleep. Being able to sleep after made it much more tolerable. Would have been even better if I didn’t wait nearly a decade to think it was important enough to share with my doctor.
Aren’t human brains fun? So kind of our brains to show us everything terrifying that it can cook up and place into our lived reality just to fuck with us.
It’s ridiculous! The terrors were so regular that they became interesting and funny stories I’d share with my friends. Very much thought of “my brain” as a spearate being from me because it sure wasn’t on my side. Rude.
I know my brain is like at least 70% memes, but nooo, it’s gotta be the horrors in sleep paralysis. Always gotta be the horrors with those damned things. How much funnier would it be to wake up to like a confused Travolta or a doge in your living room.
Oh that’s what that is 😅 I have that a bunch - was hard to describe as it’s not sleep paralysis. It’s often… confusing… and occasionally disturbing but I’m a bit used to it at this point. It is so weird how it persists until the lights come on
I sat bolt upright in the middle of the night one time talking to the wall, kinda grumpily, and my partner was really disturbed… trying to explain to her that the customs officer wanted something didn’t really help that much.
Seeing bed bugs all over my whole body and everywhere in a grungy motel was pretty disturbing. And a hooded man in the corner, staring, during the middle of the night in a new persons’ bed.
I’ve had this for as long as I can remember. Normally it’s with something like. It’s or snakes, but occasionally I’ll see a figure in the doorway, or think there something standing or floating by my bed.
It’s rather annoying, especially for my wife since I usually have to turn on the light fire my brain decides it’s ok.
It’s interesting to think that people who have seen “demons” or been visited by ghosts may have experienced something like this. In times before modern science, there was probably no other explanation.
This is almost definitely the case with ghost and alien abduction stories.
Well, that and carbon monoxide poisoning.
Don’t forget about the rarer, but super cool weird physical phenomena like ball lightning and swamp gas!
Important to include those explanations that aren’t just psychological/hallicinatory phenomena, I feel.
